Mercedes has revealed all the damage caused by two accidents in Friday's Austrian qualifying, which compromised the rest of the weekend.
Mercedes revealed all the damage caused by two accidents in Friday's Austrian qualifying session, which compromised the rest of the weekend.
Lewis Hamilton felt the potential to be in the top three with his W13 on Friday at the Red Bull Ring, with his qualifying performance suggesting that he was in contention to achieve that goal.
That was until Q3, when Hamilton hit the barriers hard at turn 7, with teammate George Russell also crashing his W13 shortly after the restart at turn 10.
Hamilton was forced to change his chassis after this incident, but the repair work on both cars went on much longer.
Speaking on Mercedes' Austrian GP video, technical director Mike Elliott said, "When you crash two cars, it's always going to be a very difficult weekend from then on."
"We had a lot of damage to the cars, we broke both floorboards, we broke both rear wings, we damaged the suspension quite a bit, on Lewis' car we also damaged the front wing and we had some cosmetic damage to the chassis. So it was damage that we can repair, but not repair perfectly in one weekend. That meant completely rebuilding Lewis' car from scratch."
At this point, the lack of spare parts became a big problem for Mercedes.
With only a spare floorboard and rear wing, Mercedes had to create another floorboard from the salvageable parts of those involved in the accidents, while the rear wing was given to Hamilton to help him pass through the peloton, having started Saturday's sprint race in P9.
This left Russell competing with a rear wing that was not ideal for the Red Bull Ring.
"It also meant trying to build a floorpan of two," Elliott continued. "We had a full spare that would fit, and we had to make the best of the two broken decks to build another one."
"And it also meant that we were committed to George's rear wing because we only had one full rear wing that we chose to fit Lewis' car because he would have to go through the grid, which meant that George had to use a rear wing that probably didn't have the ideal level of downforce, it was a bit too much for that circuit."
"Having rebuilt the cars, we also had to adjust the set-up again and you have very limited time in TL2 to do that and that was always going to be another compromise and ultimately damaging both cars as much as we did on Friday meant that the drivers were in a positionIt meant that the drivers were in a position where if we damaged either car in the sprint race, we could be in a position where we couldn't race on Sunday."
"So all of that has to be taken into consideration and all of that compromises their weekend, because the drivers couldn't risk crashing again."
Hamilton was able to recover to score a podium finish in P3, his third in a row, while Russell's race was marred by a first-lap collision with Sergio Perez and the resulting five-second penalty.
He was, however, able to reach the checkered flag in P4.